Socialism and the Commons

Critique of the existing system has never been lacking on the Left. But, argues Danijela Dolenec, Elinor Ostrom's empirical work on the commons suggests another approach, one that seeks to discover the practical underpinnings of durable socialist organization. As Dolenec puts it, 'the design of
institutions that would embody socialist power is the primary task of the Left'.

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That Elinor Ostrom
received the Nobel prize for economics in 2009 may be read as a sign of a shift
in mainstream economics thinking, a signal that the neoclassical project of
formulating general propositions into neat formal models was showing some
cracks. According to the Nobel prize committee, her contribution lay in
challenging the conventional wisdom 'by demonstrating how
local property can be successfully managed by local commons without any
regulation by central authorities or privatization'. In other words,
her theory of governance represents a break from the states-markets dichotomy
in which a resource can either be governed by the state, or via the market and
private property rights. In contrast, Ostrom's empirical and theoretical work
focused on studying forms of collective action based on self-organization and
self-governing – and the implication of her work was that Hardin's prediction of the
tragedy of the commons can be avoided; people can manage resources in a
sustainable way. She focused primarily on common-pool resources such as fisheries
and communal forests, but since 1990 when the book Governing
the Commonscame out,her work
has been extended far beyond principles for governing natural resources. Not
only that, recently we are witnessing the development of an international
commons movement. In May this year, over 200 people from 30 countries gathered
in Berlin for the Economics of the Commons
Conference, discussing ideas, practices and alliances for developing the commons
into a core paradigm for the economy and society.

Taking all this on board,
it seems worthwhile to engage with Ostrom's work. In this essay I focus on
three aspects in which I consider her work important - if read critically. The
first is moving 'beyond states and markets', the second is her underlying
theory of social change and the third is her focus on governance principles.

I.

Ostrom theorised examples
of collective action outside the state or market, where communities organized
themselves into sustainable self-managed cooperatives. She did not suggest that
we need to bring down capitalism or for the state to wither away. Instead she
saw commons governance principles as complementary to them; we may think of
this as a kind of Third Way approach. In some situations, she argued, the best
way of managing resources was through self-organisation and collective ownership
rights.

Her focus on a domain
beyond states and markets in important because it can be used to criticise
processes of privatization and commodification of ever new domains of social
life, as well as the failings of representative democracy. Demands for
self-organisation and collective ownership couched in the language of the
commons have been an important force in contemporary social movements across
Europe which are struggling against the privatization of utilities,
infrastructure and services in the public sector.

At the same time, Ostrom's
critique of the states and markets dichotomy is incomplete. Ostrom was
concerned with theorising principles of sustainable governance, and not with
challenging the underlying logic of capitalism. As a result, the potential for
social change within her conception of the commons is limited. If we use Nancy
Fraser's typology of affirmative and transformative struggles, Ostrom's
conception of the commons inspires mostly affirmative action, which remedies
some unwanted consequences of capitalist modes of production, but leaves the
underlying structure intact. For instance, many commons initiatives focus on
urban gardens, communal childcare, or developing workplace democracy. While
they are worthwhile as sites of individual emancipation and as valuable
experience of grassroots organising - on their own they often represent
a-political, fragmented actions that cannot address the underlying structural
logic of the problems at hand. In addition to that, these 'complementary
commons' initiatives often represent middle-class life projects, since only
people with sufficient income and spare time can engage in them.

To be blunt, we may introduce
hundreds of worker-owned factories, but if they operate within a capitalist
logic of production than we have not brought about a transformative social
change towards radical egalitarian democracy. In contrast to that, the theory
of the commons should be advanced, as Ugo Mattei and others have argued, by rejecting
the conception of the commons as a Third Way. Ostrom's work should be built
on in the direction that affirms the values of radical democracy, material
sustainability and egalitarianism without forgetting to critically examine
capitalism as a site of exploitation and domination.

II.

Elinor Ostrom's work is
important in part for the way it demonstrates the virtues of institutional
economics. The focus on institutions undermines neoclassical accounts by
exposing capitalism as a historically specific social formation based in
particular social and legal norms. At the same time, her work falls within
rational choice institutionalism, which means that it is grounded in understanding
how individuals make decision is social dilemmas – that is, how collective
action happens given what we know about individual behaviour. In other words,
Ostrom's theory is based in methodological individualism, whereby social
outcomes are explained by understanding individual behaviour. In a nutshell, in
the big agency-structure debate, hers is a theory of agency.

Now, we do need a theory
of agency if we are interested in social change, and we need an empirically
sound conception of individual motivation. In this respect Ostrom's work
represents an important qualification of the homo economicus model because she argues that humans are 'better
than rational'. Her conception of human nature does not deny that we are
rational beings which are striving to exercise some control over our lives, but
it denies the deeply pessimistic premise of the rational actor theory according
to which all choices in life boil down to a rational calculus of costs and
benefits. Instead she argues that our actions and choices are deeply imbedded
in norms and social relations, offering up a vision of humans as deeply social:
communicative, trustworthy and cooperative.

In contrast to the
neoclassical economics perspective which starts from the premise that
collective action will not happen or is doomed to fail in some sort of tragedy
of the commons, Ostrom’s work advances a different conception of human nature,
in which people are naturally social actors. In addition to that, she stressed
the pivotal role of communication in engendering collective action. It is
through communication that we are able to actively shape social rules rather
than passively complying with top-down directives. In other words, it is
through communication that the so-called 'non-cooperative outcomes' are
transformed to cooperative ones, where collective action may lead to
sustainable and equitable governance practices. Without such a concept of
humankind we have no business trying to theorise emancipatory social change.

At the same time, because
of its focus on individual behaviour Ostrom's theory is weak in addressing the
structural origins of injustice. When we apply a theoretical lens which is
blind to 'society' and only sees individuals making choices, we have divested
ourselves of even perceiving, let along addressing power relations which
originate in the systemic properties of existing economic and political systems. In this
respect Ostrom's theory falls short of the mark both in diagnosing the causes
of contemporary social ills and in devising ways out of it.

III.

As is clear by now, I
advance a critical political conception of the commons in which they
represent vehicles for taking power over conditions needed for life and its
reproduction. This is related to the third aspect of Ostrom's work that I
wanted to reflect on: the
concept of the commons should be understood as centrally concerned with
principles of governance, not ownership regimes as some contemporary
theorists contend. In identifying key principles for governing sustainably, Ostrom
shifted the focus away from ownership regimes towards emphasising governance
principles. The foundational principle of the commons that
emerges from her work is that those
affected by a given rule should participate in making it, irrespective of
the ownership regime. For collective action to bring about sustainable
governance regimes it needs to be deeply democratic, reliant on
self-organisation and based in the principle of subsidiarity.

In distilling hundreds of
case studies of sustainable management of commons into basic components,
Ostrom's theory can be read as an attempt to identify the main foundational
principles of successful collective action. I believe this is the way forward
in theorising a socialist governmentality, in the sense of devising specific principles
that would ground the socialist state and economy. For Foucault, governmentality
refers to techniques and procedures through which individuals and populations
are governed. Governmentality encompasses both the ideational and the
practical component (knowledge and power), while according to Foucault
socialism possesses only the former - it lacks
the practical capacity to generate political institutions that would embody its
economic rationales. If we start from that premise, then the design of
institutions that would embody socialist power is the primary task of the Left.
Considering the sources of resilience of the liberal governmentality, I think
that, rather than attempting to create blueprints for the overall institutional
structure of a socialist state, it is more useful to identify the key
principles of socialist governmentality, as Ostrom did with principles of
sustainable governance of natural resources.

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